Mutiny – on Being More Pirate

‘Move slowly… and don’t break people’

It was an absolute pleasure to join Alex Barker and Sam Conniff on their Be More Pirate podcast – which has been released just this past week:

Sam wrote Be More Pirate back in 2018, and has been incredibly kind about my own book Mutiny, which I released way back in 2012.

I was fortunate enough to be offered a chance to reflect on the ideas within it ten years on for a special extended essay in the YoHo journal in 2022. What took up the bulk of that piece was a reassessment of the concept of TAZ – of the ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ – that I’d proposed as a means of social change.

My concern was that the idea of the pirate had itself been plundered:

The agile shape-shifter of aggressive capitalism pulled off a quite extraordinary feat: it took on the costume of the pirate.

In Trump, Johnson, Putin etc we see powerful members of the established elite play the role of populist disruptors who will ‘drain the swamp,’ ‘clean up corruption’ ‘take back control for people’… while actually mugging the electorate and increasing inequality as money drains upwards to the 1%.

And this tactic of TAZ – of bedazzlement – has too been coopted. We are literally blinded by the chaos.

So my question when I think about the book now is this: how do we pirate the pirates? What moves are left to us when powerful elites have coopted the idea of revolution?

In particular, I was reminded of a quote from a review of a novel by Milan Kundera:

‘In an age like ours, when everyone, to gain attention, walks on his hands, the individual who stands on their own two feet will be taken for an acrobat.’

This was 2022, and everywhere seemed to have been acrobatics… Johnson’s BS over Covid, the utter nonsense of Brexit, and the constant reverse-speak over Putin’s war against Ukraine.

But it did seem that there were green shoots of new growth that felt as if perhaps there were some moves left for us. Trump was ousted, as was Johnson, and – as I set out in the book – there were some examples of grass-roots activism that, I hope, offered hope.

The edition of the journal is no longer in print… and perhaps it is fitting that it – like the green shoots – were short-lived. Trump is back, Putin is worse than ever, and the situation is Gaza is a testament to the utter failure of global politics to act to protect justice and promote peace.

But… but… we have to sustain our hope that this current ordering of the world, this arrangement of things by the powerful, is not it. That, at its core, is the pirate gospel. As I write in part of the conclusion:

Our democracy is in dire trouble. We need people to do the sacrificial work of committing to institutions, or risk these institutions being eroded and corrupted by those who will use them for their own gain. We have a generation wanting to be ‘influencers,’ while there are too few good people in teaching, wanting to be MPs or councillors.
The capitalist spirit of the prodigal son saw liberty as having as much to spend on himself as possible. But the true act of liberation was never about the loot. In the struggle for liberty for all who were oppressed the true pirates put their bodies on the line. This is my body, given…

Bloodied, beaten, hung from gibbets, their skull and crossed bones so threatened the powerful because it signified their full, corporeal commitment to resisting the wide injustice that they saw impacting slaves, indigenous communities, working people exploited by the rich.

What if Rosa Parks hadn’t refused to move her body? What if the bodies of millions of black people hadn’t then been moved to refuse to put their bodies onto Montgomery buses, to march into water cannons, attack dogs and truncheons?

What if we took our online outrage outside? A mass, a communion, stood shoulder to shoulder in the streets?
Our ability to do so is in peril. The clowns we allowed to acrobat their way into political leadership are fast making peaceful protest illegal. Why? Because they know that bodies gathered in faithful rebellion present the most striking danger to their ruse.

This principle of solidarity, ‘joining’, and a new citizenship what I’ve been spending my time thinking about over these past months – hence not writing a great deal here. It’s been a hugely productive period though, and I hope to have more news on that soon .-)

This podcast actually gives a pretty decent summary of the ways I’ve been working to progress a follow-up to God-like, a book that will – I hope – combine the principles in Mutiny and its YoHo follow-up, with my thoughts on how we can thrive in a world so dominated by increasingly-powerful technologies (and those who control them). Part of that is about countering the mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ with a way of being that looks to go more slowly, and not break people in the process.

More on that soon. Hope you enjoy listening! And if you want more, do have a listen to the panel I convened at this year’s Greenbelt Festival too: